The Secret Book of Paradys

by Tanith Lee

  The man rose up and slapped her glancingly across the head.

  “Stop your nagging. Do as you’re bid.”

  The girl palmed the penny and came suddenly back to the door.

  No one was there as she stepped outside, but as she began her trudge towards the tavern, something did appear, like a greater shadow thrown up at her back, with, near the apex, two narrow green incandescences.

  Eastward, over the heights and scoops of the City, the sky was draining of its black. The creatures of Hell, which preferred darkness, would be seeping down into the ground.

  Years ago, when she was only a brat of five, there had been atrocities committed in the dark. Her own mother, a whore before her, had sat whispering over the cooking fire with her cronies, all telling each other of the woman by the fish market who had had all her parts torn out. And the body was burned, for they said a devil had done it and evil’s infection might be there on the rags of the corpse. That thing, certainly, had toiled by night at its ripping, as she and her sisterhood toiled against posts, trees, and walls, or flat in some leaky boat under the wharf.

  These were the thoughts in the trudging girl’s head. She put them aside briskly and promised herself a swig of the stink-pig’s ale.

  As she was turning aside into Goat’s Alley, the harlot realised that a man was behind her. She could smell him, and feel his heat, and next moment he caught her round the body.

  “Hey, hey,” said the girl, who was used to rough embraces, and she turned herself to look.

  Her first impression frightened her, for the alley was still all of the night, and what she seemed to find had hold of her was a black shape, maned, and with teeth drawn, luminous-eyed, uncanny.

  But she sloughed the notion, and stared, and saw instead the sick beggar from the shed-shelter.

  He was shaking with a fever, hot with fires, and his eyes, if they were not demoniac, had a rabid glare she knew to be careful of.

  “Now what can you be wanting, sieur?”

  His teeth glittered as he panted. He seemed to try to force her to the wall.

  “Not now,” she said, “my old man’s waiting. And you’re not fit for it.”

  To Raoulin her voice was barely audible, and she herself seemed a great way off down a tunnel of mists and lights. It seemed he must have her, carnally. His loins had readied themselves, and so after all this had been the want which drove him to hunt her down. And yet, the want was not solely lust, as he had known it was not, in its parched starvation, a hunger or thirst. His entire body strained towards a sort of stretching and yawning, and the picture in his mind now was of a snake yawning off over its head its entire skin.

  But the girl resisted, playful and determined.

  She seemed scared now, too, like the other one.

  “If I call,” she said, “Jenot will hear me at the inn. He’s a big man. He’ll come and see to you. Now leave off.”

  She thrust at him and Raoulin slammed her into the wall. At that she did scream, and the cry brimmed through his brain. He saw himself, as if from the air above. He saw himself – and another.

  A corpse-light was over him. It was in his eyes. It altered him. This one could throw the girl back and rape her. At the crisis, the stem of flame would mount through him, as he had seemed to feel it before, from phallus to sacrum, through the vertebrae, into the skull. And then –

  And then the demon which possessed him, which he had conceived at his union with the dead girl – the demon would yawn off his skin and make him, as it had made Heros d’Uscaret, into the mindless, feeding unlife which was itself.

  Raoulin, by an effort of flesh and will, wrenched himself from the terrified whore. He seemed, as he did so, torn apart. Nausea boiled in his guts, he went blind with pain and illness, and staggering away, left her. She ceased yelling at once, and let him go. No man came rushing to her aid, either. The alley was empty. And the next. Not that he saw.

  He tried to pray to God. No words would come. He had mislaid all the orisons, all the entreaties.

  But what he had almost done, to her, to himself –

  It came to him he had been hearing her thoughts, those memories that concurred with Helise’s tale, and that might be the prelude to the latest tale, the rebirth of the demon.

  In the nightmare he had no compass points. There was nowhere he might return, no sanctuary to be had. Friends, family, the swamps of raptures, the pinnacles of debate and learning – nowhere could he perceive salvation.

  And he recalled how an elderly stern sour priest had warned him of the loose women of Paradys, of some dire disease he might catch. But he had caught the contagion of the Devil.

  The sky was bright now, over his left shoulder, where Satan stood in the stories.

  Then the last alley broke into a slender street that passed under some tall houses. One had a vine growing up its timbers. He gazed at it, as if at a creeper from Atlantis. Then his legs gave way. He fell in the street. He lay there, and heard the world start to be industrious all about, the notes of brooms and pans, a donkey’s complaint, a young girl singing. The Prima Hora was sounding from a score of churches.

  Raoulin scrabbled in his belt, obscenely, as he would have brought forth the blade of procreation and death. This blade was better. Strange he had not recollected, until now, the break of day, his knife.

  As he found the place between his ribs, and poised the steel there, an insane whirling and denying dashed through his blood. Suicide was the ultimate sin. (Did he think God would ever forgive him? Through the endless centuries until Doomsday, Heros had said, He would not.)

  “It’s you,” said Raoulin, “foul thing, tempter. You can’t dissuade me.”

  Raoulin did not credit God, besides. The Devil had won. But in this one game he should not.

  Raoulin jammed the knife between two ribs, for the heart.

  The pain was incredible. Bile and blood came into his mouth. He wept, and pushed the blade in further.

  His heart seemed to break, like a pane of glass.

  A woman was coming down the street with a pitcher, for some well. She was like an apparition. He saw her halting to consider him.

  Before he saw what she would do next, night dropped back on him. Down into Hell he rolled head over heels.

  PART SEVEN

  The Demon

  So runs my dream: but what am I?

  An infant crying in the night:

  An infant crying for the light:

  And with no language but a cry.

  Tennyson

  They were respectful to her, in the City streets, when they saw her now and then going to and fro with her nurse or her maid. They said, she had been educated like a boy, could read many languages, was fluent in Latin, had knowledge of music and ritual dance old as time … which was charming, and of alchemy … which was unsuitable. They did not suggest she was a sorceress, as they never plainly referred to her father as a magician. But they did call her, in general parlance, the Beautiful Jewess.

  She had risen very early, and gone to pluck herbs in the house’s inner courtyard; these seen to, she sat reading a treatise of Galen’s, there in her bedroom which caught the morning sun. Her black hair hung about her like clusters of black grapes, and covered only by a little black velvet cap. The striped cat, now a matron of the establishment, lay playing with a sunbeam on the bed. Even the doll remained, seated in a corner on a wooden chest, a toy no longer, but venerable.

  There came a noise from the street. The Beautiful Jewess raised her head, and the cat paused, open-mouthed.

  The noise was not especially usual. It seemed to be that of a dropped pot, which shattered.

  The very next instant, someone knocked on the street door.

  Ruquel’s window looked east, into the court. Even the sound had reached her by a sideways trick, vision was not possible.

  Yet something caused her to get up, touching the cat upon the forehead as she went by (rather as the mezuzah was touched at the doorway) and out of the room and
down the stair.

  In the hall below, Liva the porter had already unfastened the door. He was almost seven feet tall, mild as a lamb, but evidently capable of killing with his bare hands. He had come to the household several years since.

  The nurse was also at the door, and outside a throng of women and a few men had gathered. There had been exclamations. Now a silence. Into this, Ruquel descended.

  The nurse, seeing her, made a motion she should not approach.

  “Why not? What is it?”

  The nurse put her hand over her own eyes. Though she was protective, she knew Ruquel had not been trained to docility, or ignorance. “An awful sight. A young man has slain himself at our door.”

  Ruquel stopped a moment, very pale and straight, then she came down the last of the stair and crossed the hall. Liva too gave way to her in the door.

  He lay, the suicide, with no doubt across the very threshold, as if the angel of death, in a passover, had thrown him there. His black hair streamed on the cobbles, his face had been calmed by the darkness of his sleep, all but the eyes. Closed, they had about them a strange tension, as if he had been weeping. One seemly thread of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. His hand rested quite gracefully and couthly on the hilt of the knife, which otherwise was sunk into his breast.

  Ruquel regarded him. The watchers observed the Beautiful Jewess went whiter than her own whiteness. Then she knelt down, and put her fingers to the temple, the throat, of the cadaver. Then she set her hand in the air over his lips, and brought it away.

  After a minute, she lifted her long-lashed eyes and announced: “Liva, you must bring him into my father’s house. He isn’t dead.”

  Someone in the street protested. Ruquel did not take notice, but as Liva was leaning forward, Ruquel touched his arm, and said quietly, “Take care as I did to have no contact with the blood.” Without a question Liva nodded. He leaned and gripped his burden, the weight of a full-grown man, like that of a child.

  Ruquel rose. “You know that my father has tutored me,” she said to the street. “The muscle in the young man’s chest is very hard, and he, it seems, very weak. He could not complete the blow.”

  When the door was shut, the nurse said, “If he lives, they’ll say your father, or you, raised him from the dead.”

  “So be it,” said Ruquel, with an abstracted smile.

  Haninuh, when he returned from an excursion into the City that twilight, was met by his daughter at the door. Though the house was always well lit, it was the hour of lamp-lighting, and Ruquel presented to her father a poetic oriental image as she stood before him, limned by the ivory candle-lamp she bore, in her silver earrings and little velvet cap, and barefoot as about the house she always was. The striped feline sounded its timbrels at her side.

  “Welcome, my father.”

  The rite of homecoming was performed swiftly but warmly.

  “You have a guest,” she said then. “We housed him in the Cedar Chamber.”

  “Oh, does he have a liking for trees?” (The chamber was painted over one wall to the ceiling with a cedar tree; some guests had declared they heard all the owls and doves of Lebanon mewing in its branches.)

  “He likes nothing, being nearly dead.”

  Haninuh frowned. “He’s a man of the City?” This was a Jew who never spoke of “gentiles.”

  “I have not seen him before. If my father has seen him, how can I say.”

  But she revealed, as they climbed the stair, the morning’s astonishment, passing on to the afternoon’s labour. In an interpolation, she stressed the care she had felt prompted to take with regard to bodily fluids, the protections she had formed. She was very skilled herself in medicines, for the Jew himself had taught her, and in other elements more mysterious.

  “Will he live?” asked Haninuh therefore, in the corridor.

  “It’s for my father to say. I trust he will.” Ruquel turned her candle from a draught, and her face was veiled in shadow. “But, he longs to die.”

  “Why so, I wonder? You name him a young man, and sound but for the wound.”

  They reached the door of the Cedar Chamber. Inside, a lovely lamp of Eastern filigree hung from a stand and dusted the air with frankincense. The great tree spread over the plaster, and the nurse kept watch in its shade. In his bed, bathed and made clean, the suicide lay on his pillows, like a saint of wax.

  The Jew went to a basin and washed his hands. He spoke inaudible words. Then he proceeded to examine the unconscious man thoroughly. At length, he straightened up and replaced the covers.

  “He gives little enough sign of life. But life persists. Rarely have I seen such a wound seal itself so rapidly. I know your cleverness as a doctor, Ruquel, but from what you tell me, this is not so much your wisdom as some connivance in the flesh. Spirit and body are at odds.”

  Later, when they took their supper together, the father questioned the daughter over again, and they discussed their visitor broodingly.

  “How is it, finding him thus, you thought he might survive?”

  “I hoped for it,” said Ruquel simply. “At first I could find no tremor of the heart. But at my touch it came as if to meet me. And then seemed to grow stronger.”

  “I cannot think he and I have been familiar with each other,” said the Jew, “yet there’s about him something I know or imperfectly remember. Well. Until he wakes, speculation bears no fruit. Before you sleep,” he added, “if you’re willing, go to the room and make music on your harp.”

  “Your will is mine,” she said.

  “And am I to think,” he said, “you do it only to please me?”

  The harp which Ruquel brought to the Cedar Chamber was a model of the little kinnor, a crescent of bow-horn which she leaned to her shoulder, from which crescent ten horsehair strings stretched to a horizontal bar of ereb willow. Beneath, the unstretched tails of the strings provided a fringe that, occasionally, the striped cat was wont to bite.

  The nurse nodded in her chair. Liva was soon due to take his watch.

  Ruquel sat where she could see the mosaic of the filigree lamp upon the sick man’s face.

  She plucked chords of a twanging fluidity from the harp, and, as the music found its way, sang very low a melody without words, old as the Jordan, perhaps.

  She had serenaded him for less than three minutes when a sigh, more a convulsion, rushed in and out of him. His eyelids fluttered and one arm sought from the covers. (The nurse slept on.)

  Ruquel did not stop her music, but now her eyes were fixed only on him.

  The wordless song flowed and twined among the reedy pangs of the harp.

  Another three or four minutes elapsed.

  Abruptly, with no further prologue, the eyes of the young man opened wide.

  Ruquel ceased playing and singing.

  She was intensely unnerved, as if fire had been thrust into her face.

  She had known that his eyes would be dark as her own. But the eyes looked at her now. Focused on her with feral acuity. They were brilliantly, violently and unhumanly green. Emeralds set in optic sockets.

  Mastering herself, Ruquel said, “Sieur, you’re with friends. Lie quietly. I shall fetch my father.”

  But the young man said, “It hears the music. It knows your song.”

  “Who?” said Ruquel, holding back her terror with a rein of steel.

  Then he sagged into the pillows, and he only said, “My God, my God. Didn’t I die? It’s all to do over. If you’re kind, fetch your father, someone, to brain me with a mace. Then burn – then burn the body.”

  Raoulin slept the slumber of opiates. In that deep sea, he lost himself, and coming back to shore learned a month of days had been sunk there too. He did not protest. In sleep he had been incapable of harming another, or of facilitating – that, which was now his constant companion, the unborn child of death and destruction caged in the male womb of his loins.

  Somewhere in the sleep there had been dreams. He recalled none of them, and was glad of that
. Sometimes, also, he believed Haninuh the Jew had questioned him, and he had answered. And perhaps it, too, had done so. And he seemed to have heard the soft jangle of the kinnor, then, across dark reedy waters under a lion moon.

  There came an evening, when Raoulin had returned from the places of drugged sleep, and he was shown his body, a little emaciated, but with the wound healed to a plaited line. If he should move suddenly, then the muscle quirked and pained him, that was all.

  The strong man came and lifted him, and the woman washed him and he was fed. There were some days of that, and some nights of shallow dozing, for sleep had been too long with him and now proved elusive.

  He was afraid they would let the beautiful daughter in to tend on him. He was afraid of what the demon would make him do. And of the aftermath.

  But the daughter did not come near him now.

  There began to be days of letting him out to walk in a small enclosed court with fruit trees in pots, and herbs and flowers and a little sunken well. One day, as he marched aimlessly about there, to toughen himself – because they had said he must – he beheld a striped cat, which arched its back and hissed at him, then jumped up a series of perches to a window above, where it vanished. This furred angel was her messenger, he thought, the room must be that of Ruquel. And he longed to see her there, for an instant, for she was safe enough at that distance from him, he was not vital enough as yet to go after her. She had been very beautiful, very gentle.

  He must not try to reason where her room lay inside the house. In any case, there was the giant, thank God, to protect her. And the Jew … surely the Jew was a magician.

  As he patrolled the courtyard, Raoulin kept thinking of Ruquel, as of something precious he could never hope to see or touch, some prize once within his grasp, and now lost for ever, like the hope of Heaven. And added to this forfeiture there came to be the remembrance of his family, his friends, the university, the City, time, youth, and the world.

  Then he sat down on the plot of grass beside the well, and he cried, and he was so weak his body was rocked and racked with it, this grief. But all the while, even as he wept these scalding tears, he sensed the other, waiting, waiting there, within him, for the hour he would belong to it and exist only to achieve its will.